Chapter 9
“Is it true?”
Celia stood in her kitchen with the blind down and her hand flat on the counter.
“Yes.”
She heard him breathe out. It was not a word. It went on for a while and it had something under it that she chose not to identify, and then the line was quiet for long enough that she looked at the screen to check he was still there.
“Okay,” Lawrence said.
“That’s it?”
“What would you like me to say?”
And that stopped her, because she had spent five months building a wall against everything he might say and had never once prepared for him to ask.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“No.” A dry sound, not quite a laugh. “Me either.”
Another silence. Behind him she could hear the small room again — a radiator, a floorboard, nothing else. No house. No people. A man in four rooms at ten o’clock at night.
“Roslyn’s sending something to your lawyer in the morning,” she said. “It says the fact. I want you to know it was written yesterday, not tonight. It was going out either way.”
“I believe you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Celia.” His voice did something. “I believe you.”
She put her forehead against the cabinet door.
“I’m going to ask you one thing,” Lawrence said, “and if it’s the wrong question you can hang up and I won’t call again. That’s not a threat, it’s — I’ve got no standing to ask you anything, I know that.”
“Ask.”
“Are you all right? Not the — not this.” A breath. “Are you all right. Is it going well. Is somebody looking after you.”
Celia closed her eyes.
Nine years of a man who came home and said how was your day into the middle distance while looking at a phone, and here he was in a gatehouse at ten at night, asking her a question and then waiting for the answer with the whole line silent.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s going well. Frankie knows. Margaret knows. There’s a clinic and it’s boring, which is what you want.”
“Good.” Then: “Margaret knows?”
“Since February.”
“She never said a word.”
“No,” Celia said. “She’s better than all of you.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She is.”
And there it was — the shorthand, coming up out of the ground after five months like it had never gone anywhere, the two of them agreeing about his sister at ten at night in the tone they had always used for it.
It happened in under a second and Celia felt it land in her chest like a stone in water.
She straightened up.
“I’m going to go.”
“Okay.”
“Lawrence.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t call me again,” she said. “Not because of tonight. Tonight was — you were owed tonight. But everything after this goes through Roslyn, and if you start calling me at ten at night we’ll be two people having phone calls, and I’m not doing that.”
There was a pause.
“Understood,” he said.
And he hung up first, which he had never once done in nine years, and she stood in the kitchen holding a dead phone and could not work out why that was the part that made her sit down.
* * *
“You answered it,” Frankie said.
“I answered it.”
“On the fifth ring.”
“I counted four. I answered on the fifth.”
“Which means you stood there for four rings.” Frankie was making an omelet in Celia’s four-hundred-and-ten square feet with a violence the eggs had not earned. “I’m not judging. I want to be clear that I’m not judging. I’m noting.”
“You’re noting loudly.”
“It’s a small apartment.” She slid the thing onto a plate and put it in front of Celia and sat down. “What did he sound like?”
Celia thought about it properly, because Frankie deserved a real answer and because she had been avoiding giving herself one for two days.
“Small,” she said.
“Good.”
“No — not humbled small. Not performing. I mean the room he was in sounded small.” She turned the fork over. “Frankie, he asked if I was all right, and then he stopped talking and let me answer. That’s it. That’s the whole thing that’s bothering me. He asked a question and then he was quiet.”
Frankie’s face went complicated.
“Nine years,” she said.
“Nine years.”
“And he manages it once, in a gatehouse, after a website—”
“I know.”
“—and it’s still the nicest thing anybody’s done to you since October, and you know that’s the trap, and knowing it doesn’t help even slightly.”
Celia put the fork down.
“That’s exactly it,” she said. “That’s precisely it.
He’s had six months of no access and no audience and he’s used them, and the change is real, and every single piece of evidence I’m getting for it comes to me sideways — through Margaret, through Chuck’s brother-in-law, through a gray car parked badly.
” She pressed her fingers against her eyes.
“If he’d come at me with any of it I could have refused it.
He hasn’t come at me with any of it. He fired her in January and told nobody.
He signed the building over without reading it.
He waited fourteen minutes on a sidewalk and fixed a rail. ”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Be in a room with him for an afternoon and sign some paper,” Celia said, “and not build anything on top of it.”
Frankie looked at her for a while.
“You’ve got about four months,” she said.
“You know that, right? Whatever you’re going to decide, you’re going to be deciding it with a newborn, and I have exactly no opinion about which way and a very strong opinion about not letting it get decided for you by a website, or a lawyer, or by being too tired to say a sentence. ”
“I know.”
“Do you know it, or are you saying it?”
“I know it,” Celia said. “That’s why I’m going in the room.”
* * *
The lawyers put them in a room nine days later, because there was no version of it that worked on paper.
That was Roslyn’s phrase. No version that works on paper.
The disclosure had landed, and the archive was still up, and there was now a set of practical questions — the timing of the decree, a clause about the child that neither side’s counsel could draft without knowing what the parties actually intended, and a press situation that had turned two people’s private arrangement into a thing with an audience.
“You do not have to be in that room,” Roslyn said. “I want to say that clearly and once. I can do all of it and you never see him.”
“How long would that take?”
“Four months. Possibly five.”
“And in a room?”
“An afternoon,” Roslyn said, “if you’re both reasonable, which is a large assumption about one of you and a certainty about the other.”
Celia looked out the window of the office over the bakery.
“Book the room.”
* * *
She was ready for grief. She had rehearsed grief.
What she had not rehearsed was that he would be early.
He was already sitting there when she came in at two, in a chair on the far side of a table with his hands flat on the wood in front of him and nothing else — no folder, no phone on the table, no counsel yet — and he stood up when she came through the door, and she watched him decide not to come around the table, and he stayed exactly where he was.
“Celia.”
“Lawrence.”
He looked terrible. That was the immediate, unhelpful fact of it. He had lost about twenty pounds and it had not gone the good way; his suit was one he had owned for years and it hung on him, and the color was wrong, and there was gray in him that had not been there in October.
And his eyes went, once, fast, to her middle — and then away, hard, deliberately, to her face.
He did not look again. Not once, for two hours. She noticed him not looking the entire time, the way you notice a sound stopping.
“Sit down,” Roslyn said, coming in behind her with a folder. “Both of you. Nobody is going to be moved by anybody’s face today.”
* * *
They were reasonable. That was the horrible part.
They went through it clause by clause — the decree timing, the disclosure schedule, the trust language, a page about the Ambler Street building that Roslyn had drafted specifically to put Celia’s authorship of it on a legal record forever, which Lawrence agreed to without so much as reading past the first line.
“You want to read that,” his counsel said.
“No.”
“Lawrence—”
“It says she designed the building,” Lawrence said. “She designed the building. Next.”
Twice, the two of them answered a question at the same time and said the same thing.
The second time it happened, about a boiler contract at the lake house, they both stopped and Roslyn’s pen stopped, and there was a silence of about three seconds in which nine years sat down in the room with them.
“Nobody minutes that,” Roslyn said.
At four o’clock they got to the paragraph about the child and everybody’s counsel got very careful, and Lawrence put his hand flat on the page.
“Can I say one thing to her, with everybody here, on the record, so it never has to be a conversation again?”
Roslyn looked at Celia. Celia nodded.
“I’m not going to ask for anything,” Lawrence said. “Not custody, not a schedule, not a right to be consulted, not a thing. Whatever she wants written, write it. If she wants me to have no standing at all, draft it and I’ll sign it this afternoon.”
His counsel said, “I have to advise—”
“You’ve advised.”
“Lawrence, you cannot—”
“Write what she wants,” Lawrence said, and he was not looking at anybody but the table. “I’m not doing that to her. She’s spent nine years having decisions made about her by people who thought they were being reasonable and I am not going to be the last one.”
The room was quiet.
Celia sat with her hands in her lap and discovered that her heart was going hard and that she was, quite unexpectedly, furious.
Because it was the right thing. It was the exactly right thing, said the exactly right way, in front of witnesses, and it had cost him something real — and it had arrived six months too late and in a conference room, and there was no possible response to it that did not make her either ungrateful or soft.
“Draft it neutral,” she said, to Roslyn, not to him. “Not nothing. Neutral. I’m not going to decide the rest of somebody’s life in April.”
Roslyn wrote it down.
Lawrence let out a breath and did not say thank you, which was the single best thing he did all day.
The last item on the schedule was the press.